Friday, March 07, 2008

AFFIRMATIVE / NEGATIVE

Ben Slater's Vista 8 (above) walks away with the gong, applauded by the judges for its "monochromatic location" and "snatched inclusion of Bowie's man-machine classic, 'Always Crashing in the Same Car'". My phone is very old and doesn't have a camera, otherwise I would have done some sort of La Jetee rip-off. Ben has improved on this - his film yearns like Marker's film, but it has a fuzzy dislocation all of its own.

The limitations of time and equipment in a camera-phone movie mean that any story you evoke will be made up of shards of moments. A bit like Miles Davis's modal music, where the fullness of the music is created by paring down the parts, except that here the emptiness of the movie is created by adding in atoms of memory - photos, a snatch of TV, a building, a reflection. The result is ambiguous but definite. I like it. I might try and make one - my Nikon camera may be a little higher-tech than my phone, but it's hardly Hollywood.

Actually, my choice for top dog would have been this: the splendidly-titled Superego, where Ballard catches and contradicts himself while answering the questions generated by the automatic Eyckman Personality Quotient. I think this is a bit of a classic - from now on, when I have a tough choice to make, I shall simply ask Ballard!